Topic: Animal Crossing: New Horizons

@NEStalgia I know. This game is supposed to be on an island, not a town like previous games have been. I want to keep it an island-like setting, but that seems to be impossible if you want to get a 5-star rating. So I'm just going to try to get the 5-star long enough to get the rewards for it and then go back to my island ways. Although the guide says that the rarest mushrooms become more common on a 5-star island, so maybe I'll keep it at least through November to make sure I can get all those mushroom recipes completed.

@Anti-Matter "I was thinking next Animal Crossing should be like Dragon Quest Builders 2.
My hype will be 200/100 if that happened. 😍"

If the alternative is what we have here, and as a fan of DQB, I actually have to agree with that! I'd prefer spinoffs and keep the life sim and building sims as two separate series. I think that would do well. But the DQB one has to have a lot more story, too, like DQB!

You're not wrong. If they're going to do the building sim thing....do it right. Anti definitely has a point with this @status-204. Not sure if you've played DQB1/2 at all, but if we can't have the "old" simple zen AC back, I think I'd enjoy that route more. FWIW, DQB has FAR more dialogue and individual character personality than this AC, is more story driven, and the actual life sim actually has a bit more going on for it. Thinking specifically of DQB2 in the mine-town section, if you build an environment, the townsfolk generally will interact with it heavily, etc. Moreso than in NH. The pub is heavily populated according to time of day (albeit with rapid day/night cycles.) If the series really wants to be a "Minecraft" genre, it would do well to borrow liberally from DQ's interpretation of the genre which, ironically has a little more AC to it than ACNH does.

@Cosmofantasmo I think your last comment really highlights the difference in what different people want from the game. The idea of "getting ideas on Youtube or Pinterest" makes me want to smash my console to bits. You play a game to see what's in the game and play in that world, not go trawling the internet to see what other people are "making" and make similar things. That may be how Minecraft players play games. But it's not how Animal Crossing players play games. There's a fundamental mismatch in expectations and behaviors between those two series....and they tried mashing them together here. This might make the Pinterest trawlers happy, but it's the opposite of what AC players want by disappearing into their imaginary world. Which therein is probably our conflict's origin. ACNH seems like a game designed for the social media crowd. AC players traditionally are the very opposite of the social media crowd, despite a large social-driven wave of ACNL.

@Xyphon22 Yeah. And even ACNL was an island, though the Main Street area gave it a town feel as well. I kept it pretty island-y there too. I haven't even aimed for the 5 star rewards...they want me to devastate my delicate ecology too much for that. "Just spam a bunch of crafted stuff" isn't a great way to rank an island There's more min/maxing in here than a SaGa game.

@NEStalgia Finally managed to get 5 stars. Mine’s an island type but has small “park” areas. Everyone has a decorated yard with fences... I don’t have the creativity to make my island look like a city so thankfully I’m happy with how it looks. Didn’t cut down all of my trees, either!

@BrittGOAL14 I'm going for the Nook/Castro Island method. I have a big yard loaded with stuff on the opposite end of the island from all the other houses mashed together on a thin strip under a cliff with a thin connecting street joining them. Except Cole. He's up on the highest peak of the highest mountain, because there was no more room on the thin strip. But the important thing is they are all far, far, far away from my palace surrounded by nature.

@NEStalgia

Okay, is this the problem? Why are players who enjoy the new mechanics and try to connect trough social media to get a better experience are not “AC players”.
I wouldn’t call myself one since I missed out on NL but that was the only part I could not play. But many of these people who show their ideas online played AC before for what AC is all about and still like the new game. And where is the problem to seek help online when you struggle with a game. Do you never search for how to complete a specific quest or where to find an item in other games?
I get your criticism of the game mechanics, the change of the role of the player and the update service, I understand your points and it’s your right to express your thoughts and feelings. But that’s no reason to downgrade the people who can accept the changes.
I can immerse myself in this world like I used to back in Population growing and for the same reasons. I just offered my help since you expressed your reasons why you can’t do the same. But it seems to me the cut is to deep for you?!

@status-204
„I also have to agree with you, reading people say "trawl Pinterest and Twitter for inspiration" makes me want to just quit the internet.„

But why? Seems a bit extreme to me? When you have a personal problem with using these apps, fair enough, you don’t have to use it, but others can. Luckily there is an in game mechanic too which helps in that way with the dream islands.

@status-204 Fair enough on DQB. I loved the first one (got hooked on the demo), and the second one was good, but peaked after the mine area. The fortress area after that lost me, didn't feel very buildable and felt more like a lame ARPG, and I kind of dropped off. But the mine area was fantastic (and is the most free building I've ever done in a sandbox other than Roller Coaster Tycoon.) Minecraft I can't stand 20 minutes of. It never hooked me, and never will. An empty sandbox of legos isn't for me.

I agree that AC can't be an ARPG like DQB.... though around the time of New Leaf, Fantasy Life hooked me and I couldn't help but make a lot of comparisons between it and ACNL. That's what lead me to want a crafting and resource system in AC as well. A more builder-ish AC would have to have more of a direction to it, I think than just cute animals and building, and fishing/bug hunting is something of an ARPG combat system already, albeit "in a Nintendo-like way." That could be used effectively in a new design. But I think the first part of NH is a good template for that. There was a bit of story, character interaction, development etc with Tom Nook overselling the "getaway package" etc. It was maybe a bit HHA, but it worked. Either way it's better than a stuck in limbo game that doesn't want to be a laid back life sim with tons of personality anymore, but is unwilling to commit to becoming a full building sim either. This is one area you, me, and Anti can all agree on. It's not really giving either audience quite what they want, but is trying to give both "just enough" to hang on, begrudgingly, with workarounds. It's the FE Fates of Animal Crossing. Trying to please too many different audiences by compromising all of them and hoping everyone is good with that. I want the old AC to expand, and this should have been that. But if they're going to do a genre change, they probably would have done better to go full throttle and push it. Like from 2D Metroid to Prime going full FPS (Which was Miyamoto's idea of all people! But he has nothing to do with AC. That's all Eguchi & Takahashi.)

@Cosmofantasmo It's not about whether players are "AC players or not" It's about AC having a, what, 20+ year tradition going now? People that have been with the series have certain expectations of what the series is and how it plays. If Call of Duty suddenly tried to become a combo-driven melee action game, and FIFA became a league management sim, people that have been with the series would be pretty bewildered and frustrated. The game is appealing to a an entirely different audience that wants an entirely different type of play experience previously not associated with the mainline series. It's not so much that they added new mechanics, but that those mechanics replaced many series conventions in a way that instead of complimenting or expanding players expectations within the series, simply supplants them to pave the way for an otherwise extremely different audience. In that sense, like the Wii replacing the GCN (which kinda backfired despite adding to the money bin in the short term.)

I'm certainly not downgrading anyone who likes the changes. My criticism isn't against the players that like the game - technically I do like the game....I just don't like how empty it is and that there's really not much to do at all after certain point, even before the house is upgraded. It's about the changes in the game itself and that it effectively shifted who the player is and the motivation for playing, without notifying people first. Like EA putting real advertising in their new UFC game without warning anyone before the purchase, and suddenly, there it is. Old Spice ads in your video game. I just think your idea of Youtube and Pinterest highlights the very different type of person this game seems to be designed around....and it's not really the same market that buys a new iteration of AC necessarily, which is by definition someone seeking an escapist experience, not a connected experience. If they weren't going to go 100% and "reboot" AC this time as a new genre, I still feel it should have been marketed as a spinoff, to make buyers aware of how it fundamentally changed. And as a spinoff, they could have taken the building mechanics much further and appealed to that new market even better.

It's not so much a "deep cut" - I'd describe it as an irritating stone in your shoe. You can't get it out. You can't find it every time you look for it. But every time you step, you feel it digging somewhere and it drives you crazy. I go back to the game daily, trying to find some new way to have fun with it. And I do have fun while I do my errands....but then, that's it. I wander in a circle trying to find something else that never happens. Maybe I do some fishing or something, but it feels kind of pointless. You get too little yield to make meaningful progress on the house by doing it, so it feels sort of like real life - running in circles getting nowhere.

I think a big "accidental" change in this game is a big big motivator of play in prior games is getting all those bells to upgrade the house. Beyond the lack of more efficient ways, and rewarding ways to get bells, the upgrades themselves not only unlocked more in the market/world, but the motivation to upgrade the house was to keep getting more places to put and display all that furniture you're collecting! You only got your few rooms, and each unlock gave you a whole other themed room to build! So you wanted that upgrade and worked on it. But in this game? The whole island is your decorating space....you can put all that stuff literally everywhere...... so the house upgrades are kind of a hollow reward now. You get a decorating canvas day 1, far bigger than the biggest house. Adding another 20x20 canvas on top of the 5000x5000 canvas doesn't feel really rewarding. In fact those millions of bells for that upgrade could instead be spent adding bridges and ramps to that outdoor canvas...

All that having been said, though, I feel they didn't quite know what to do with AC at all. Despite NL being the pinnacle of the ides for the series, I wonder if they ran out of ideas after that. NL sold very well, but since then they did the HHA expansion that tried to make it more game-driven. They just threw their hands in the air with Amiibo Festival. And this game took years, with a delay to arrive at something that, from my perspective, they still aren't really sure what they wanted to do with it. It feels like they took NL, copied it over, decided to remake it as a social/trending/mobile type experiment, but not totally abandon the old audience, not totally commit to a new audience, and streamline everything into sort of a basic framework rather than a fleshed out environment. Depending on what they are or aren't going to add in downloads down the line, I wonder how much of that is due to maintaining the game in the socials, and how much is due to them not actually having finished it by launch. If it's the latter, I wonder if someone buying the game in 2022 or so will have a much more full feeling experience than someone that bought it Spring 2020 and a very different perspective on the game. That's the trouble with GaaS. The early adopters are coal mine canaries.

@Cosmofantasmo Also, I think part of what @status-204 and I mean about twitter is both a mutual dislike for "social media' and everything that entails, but also the concept that a video game would require searching for "inspiration" on the internet to really know what to do with it. Even in a creatives game, the game itself should really be providing that inspiration and incentive by example. With the exception of Minecraft, most other building sims do so. They give you a campaign of sorts that shows you the kinds of fundamentals of what the design loop is all about and the game itself can inspire you for that creation aspect. A game that leans into having to use socials to "look over someone else's shoulder" - or even using Luna for that seems like a fundamentally incomplete design. One can say, Minecraft does that, and is the biggest game of all time short of Pokemon. But we already have Minecraft to be Minecraft, and it's still bigger than AC. Did we really need to take AC that was the only AC that there was and try to make it a social toy of the smartphone generation as well? I thought we had Pocket Camp for that.

@NEStalgia I despise social media and never use it and have never used it in this game, and I still enjoy it. Does my island look as awesome as all of theirs? Not even close. Do I have as many bells as them? Nope. But I still enjoy it. I honestly don't think this game is as different from previous iterations as you are making it out to be, I think the people who go crazy with the construction and turnip trading and social media make it seem that way. Some days I only play like 10 minutes just to check who the visitor is and see the shops. I think my previous posts show there are things about this game I do not like, but the fact that it is now six months old and I am just now trying to get around to getting a 5-star island shows there are other ways to play that are more akin to previous games. Too many people simply tried to do as much as possible as soon as possible and that rubbed off on people reading about the game thinking that is how you have to do it. That said, if you simply don't enjoy it that is also perfectly fine, but if it were me I would then stop playing and move on to something else and away from this forum. Now, back to placing random furniture all over my island.

@Xyphon22
Have some aesthetic sense for your island decorating.
It will help you understand about beauty, coordination, harmony and tidiness not just only in the game but also in real life.
If you think your island looks awful by random stuffs placement, try to place the right stuffs and change the arrangement to beautify your island and you will enjoy your hard work.
I enjoy ACNH because i knew a lot of secret things about ACNH that motivated me to shape my island and getting the best villagers to stay on my island.

@NEStalgia
Btw, no need to be afraid of terraforming your island.
It was a new feature on ACNH, never before exist on older animal Crossing.
Use that feature to beautify your island, no need to worry about deforestation or changing the river stream, etc because you have a power to change the island.
Use it, own it, don't mind with the changes. It was like i played FF XII with completely different Battle system as older Final Fantasy that have Random battle. I tried to adaptate with the new gameplay and it worked.
Use the Terraforming app from your character's phone and shape your island like nothing to worry about the changes.
You have your island, shape it with whatever you want. And i'm sure you will like to visit your island if your island looks beautiful, well arranged like a small resort or like cottage area or urban city. And if you have ever play The Sims games, i'm sure you have some knowledge about placing the objects outdoor and indoor. Use that experience from other games to enjoy ACNH.

@status-204 Ok, so first of all, no I have not completely read all of the walls of text you two have written (although yours seem shorter generally), so please correct me where I am wrong. But the gist of it seems to be that you think AC has been turned into Minecraft or DQ Builders, and I am simply saying that is not so. It CAN be if you choose to play it that way, which is the way most people on social media and this forum do. That is why I actually rarely get on this forum anymore. It is just full of (very nice) people abusing the system to get all the bells and items far quicker than intended. I only get on here to ask questions I may have and ran across this discussion and decided to chime in. But I know it hasn't been turned into those building games because I hate those building games and I don't play it that way. And I would never dream of trying to tell you how to enjoy it. You have played longer than I have, after all. I'm just trying to give my opinion just like you are. I play it just like every previous AC and am having a great time. I could write more, but I don't want to create a wall of text, too.

@status-204 Fair enough, I don't want to get into any kind of argument or semantics because I don't think one is needed. There are things I do not like about the game, and I'm sure there are things you do like because I would hope you wouldn't put that much time into a game that you didn't like. I just think if you want it to be like New Leaf, then go play New Leaf. It is still perfectly playable. I prefer a game to not be the same, and I believe it is still thoroughly Animal Crossing (and I have played every game in the series except Wild World, so I think I know what that entails). I do miss playing Hide and Seek with the villagers, though.

Too bad there’s no way to check on friendship status/meter. All of a sudden the villager photos seem more difficult to earn.

@BrittGOAL14 Yeah absolutely...I never got any villager photos to begin with.

@BrittGOAL14 @MarioLover92

Actually, there is a way! It shows through the ways you can interact. Lvl. 1 you get right from the start. Lvl. 2 is, when you are able to give them gifts. At lvl. 3 they are able to give you a nickname. When you reach level 4 you can change their catchphrase. If you are able to change their greeting you reached level 5 and get the chance to obtain their photo.

Deena was my fourth islander (second after the original two), and I have been trying for like 1-2 months to get her photo, giving her gifts every day. She won't give it to me. But I've had 2 or 3 much newer islanders that I would just randomly give a gift if I had too much extra furniture that gave me their photos out of nowhere. I don't know what's wrong with this crazy duck.

@MarioLover92
LOL
I got photo from villagers right after i gave them something.
I got Sherb and Curt photos.
Do you know what will i do with those photos?

Oh, don't worry. They are still alive.

@Xyphon22
Never heard of Deena, had to look her up and she seems cool with her looks and her music house and all.
The best way to trigger the photo when you reached lvl. 5 is indeed to give her furniture. I guess when she’s a longtime resident you have already reached the max level. But the furniture has to have a selling (!) price above 250 bells. You can even increase the possibility when you wrap it up in paper.
The only time I got a photo a different way was when Stitches invited me to a treasure hunt and the treasure was his picture!